Friday, October 23, 2015

- This month marks thirty years since Mark Hofmann's bombing spree led to the unraveling of his forgery scheme. The Deseret Newsreports on a panel discussion held at Provo's Writ & Vision about Hofmann's crimes, as did KUTV (with video). Salt Lake Tribune reporter Jennifer Napier-Pearce talked to Hofmann's ex-wife Dorie Olds, rare book dealer Curt Bench, and assistant LDS church historian Richard Turley in a half-hour video about the anniversary, which is well worth a watch. Dorie Olds is also the subject of a long profile by Peggy Fletcher Stack. Stack also wrote a piece on how the Hofmann forgeries led to a "revolution" in the way the LDS church managed its history.

- The Royal Institution is planning a seed-corn supper: they will sell ninety rare books from their collections at Christie's London on 1 December (sale info), hoping to raise £750,000 to fill a budget gap.

- Jeffrey Alan Miller, an Assistant Professor of English at Monclair State University, has identified a notebook in the archives at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, as what he's calling the "earliest draft" of portions of the King James Bible. Samuel Ward, the notebook's compiler, was one of those charged with creating the new translation, and these notes date from between 1604 and 1608. Miller makes his case in an article in the TLS, "Fruit of good labours," and Jennifer Schuessler followed up with a report in the NYTimes.

- Peter Verheyen has posted a thorough (and pretty fascinating) look at the demographic and usage data for the Book_Arts-L listserv over time.

- A planned exhibition of an early copy of Magna Carta was abruptly moved from Beijing's Renmin University to the British ambassador's residence.

- Much discussion over Megan Smith's post about "finding" the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments (presumably meaning the manuscript); the best followup with real explanation comes from Ann D. Gordon, editor of the Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton papers.

- A Button Gwinnett signature was on the block this week at Mullock's auction house in Shropshire, but failed to sell; it had been estimated at £60,000–80,000.

- The earliest known abecedary has been identified: it was excavated more than twenty years ago near Luxor in Egypt, and dates from the fifteenth century BCE.

- Mills College administrators announced this week that their MFA in Book Art & Creative Writing program will close complete in less than a month, as a cost-saving measure. Professor Kathleen Walkup has posted a letter about the proposed closure, along with background on the program and its curriculum, and there is a petition (signed by more than 2,800 people so far) expressing strong disagreement with the program's elimination.

- The NYPL has an exhibit up now highlighting work by female printmakers; I had the chance to see the show this week, and it's quite good indeed.

- More than 460 items from the estate of Lord Richard Attenborough sold at Bonhams for a total of nearly £780,000. Additional portions of the late actor's archive went to the University of Sussex, where they are currently being processed.

- Over at Notes from Under Grounds, graduate curatorial assistant Kelly Fleming writes about searching through booksellers' records to determine who was buying Shakespeare in Virginia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

- The Deseret Newsreports that a first edition copy of the Book of Mormon in the collections of the Adams National Historic Park in Quincy, MA was originally the personal copy of Emma Smith (her name is stamped on the spine), given to Charles Francis Adams in 1844 and signed by Joseph Smith.

- New from AAS, a screencast by Molly O'Hagan Hardy on how to convert MARC records to a spreadsheet file using MarcEdit.

- The Museum of the Aleutians, in Dutch Harbor, AK, is currently closed after several rare books were found in the director's house. The director, Zoya Johnson, has been placed on indefinite leave, saying she has no idea why the books were in her home: she reports that she must have taken them there several years ago in preparation to return them to the Russian Orthodox Museum in Anchorage (now closed), from which they had been on loan. Seems mostly like a mistake followed by misunderstandings, but it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.

- A rare M4 Enigma machine sold at Bonhams New York for $365,000, a new record.

- A map of Middle Earth annotated by Tolkien was found in a copy of illustrator Pauline Baynes' copy of LOTR by staff at Blackwell's Rare Books. It's currently up for grabs with a price tag of £60,000.

- More on the upcoming exhibition on John Dee's library at the Royal College of Physicians from Culture24.

- The British Library has purchased an extensive Gilbert and Sullivan archive from the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.

- At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier profiles an odd manuscript in the collections of McGill University: known as "The Feather Book," it was compiled in 1618 by Dionisio Minaggio, chief gardener in the state of Milan. See the full manuscript.

- IFLA's Rare Books and Special Collections section has launched a new blog, Rare & Special.

- For Cultural Compass, Gerald Cloud examines a printing error in the the HRC's copy of the Gutenberg Bible.

- The BL's Endangered Archives Programme has announced that more than five million images have now been uploaded through the program.

Reviews

- The second edition of Shakespeare's Beehive; review by Michael Dirda in the WaPo.

- David Mitchell's Slade House; reviews by Dwight Garner in the NYTimesand Ron Charles in the WaPo.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

- By unanimous consent this week the Senate passed the "Librarian of Congress Succession Modernization Act of 2015," which provides for a ten-year (renewable) term for the next Librarian of Congress. The bill has now been referred to the Committee on House Administration in the House of Representatives. Coverage from Roll Call (prior to the bill's passage in the Senate).

- What is believed to be the most substantial Gutenberg Bible fragment currently in private hands (13 leaves comprising the book of Joshua and the beginning of Judges) will be available for sale this week at London's Frieze Masters art fair, with an asking price of €2 million.

- Meredith Farkas writes for TNR on priorities for the next Librarian of Congress.

- ILAB has posted a report by Umberto Pregliasco about recent changes to Italian law on exporting books: at the moment, it appears that exporting pre-1965 books from Italy may now be impossible, and Pregliasco adds that as things stand, even tourists visiting Italy may be barred from purchasing antiquarian books.

- A first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, stolen from Mount Saint Vincent University by John Mark Tillman, was returned to Canada this week; Tillman sold the book to a collector who in turn sold it at Sotheby's in 2012.

- The British Library has acquired the manuscript of the earliest known translation (1523) of a work by Desiderius Erasmus into English. The manuscript was sold to an overseas buyer last summer, but was placed under an export ban to allow the BL to raise funds for its purchase.

- The Harvard Gazettehighlights the HarvardX course series "The Book."

- NARA has announced the results of public requests for digitization priorities and the establishment of an agency-wide priority list.

- The Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia has started a new blog, Fugitive Leaves. The first post focuses on the anthropodermic bindings in the HML's collections: recent tests have confirmed that they have five human-skin bindings.

- A 1611 King James Bible was found in a Wrexham parish church cupboard.

- The Clements Library has acquired a copy of Diego de Valadés' Rhetorica christiana (1579), described as "almost certainly the first book written by a native of Mexico to be printed in Europe."

- Stratford Hall is working on adding material to the Lee Family Digital Archive, designed eventually to be "a comprehensive annotated edition of all the known papers of the immigrant founder Richard Lee (c.1602–1663/4) and his lines of offspring (7–8 generations)."

- New from the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, vHMML, a suite of digital tools for the study of (mostly Latin) manuscripts.

- David Skinner writes for the Guardian about a songbook which is believed to have belonged to Anne Bolyen, now in the collections of the Royal College of Music.

- The Texas Center for the Book will relocate to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin.

- Adam Matthew will digitize the Stationers' Company archive; this will reportedly be available (to subscribers) in 2018.

- The second issue of furnace, a postgraduate journal from the Ironbridge Institute for Cultural Heritage at the University of Birmingham, is now available. The theme is "Cultural Heritage in a Digital Age."

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Links and reviews coming soon (I was traveling this weekend) but in looking through the new catalog from Edward R. Hamilton (and if you don't get their catalogs, you probably should) I spotted a few remainders I thought I'd better point out to readers of this blog, since better prices for new copies of these are likely to be hard to come by:

About Me

Reviews of books old and new; news and commentary on book history, library culture, digital humanities, archives and related subjects. Written by Jeremy Dibbell, a bibliophile, haunter of used bookstores, and Director of Communications and Outreach for Rare Book School. Email: philobiblos@gmail.com.